Even if, somehow, Hannah doing that felt like kind of a big deal.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get you home.”
He withdrew his wallet and threw a handful of bills down on the table. Then, as gently as he could, he pulled her hands away from her face. There were tears in her eyes again, but he did his best to make himself immune to them. He almost succeeded. Then he led her through the bar and out onto the street. It was fully dark now, but there were still plenty of pedestrians. Muted music filtered through the open doors of the bars they passed, and the air was heavy with the aroma of summer in the city.
Hannah said not a word as they made their way back to her apartment. Absently, she withdrew her keys from her purse and promptly dropped them, so Yeager scooped them up and did the honors. It wasn’t that hard. She only had three keys on her ring and he lucked into the correct one right off the bat. One of the others opened her front door at the top of the stairs. The third was probably for Cathcart and Quinn.
His own key ring held a dozen keys that he needed to get through a typical week. Hannah only needed three for the whole of her life. But then Hannah lived in one room with one window, too. He pushed her front door open and stood back for her to enter. A family fortune would certainly make her life better. If she was able to inherit.
She would be, he assured himself as he followed her into her apartment. She was a smart, capable person. She’d figure out how to make it happen. Eventually.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
She headed to the love seat and folded herself onto it. “Yeah,” she assured him in a way that wasn’t at all reassuring.
“You sure?”
She nodded. “Don’t forget your shirt.”
Damn. Good thing she’d reminded him. He actually had forgotten about it. And it was the whole reason he’d come there tonight. He crossed to the rack to retrieve it.
He’d already paid her the extra hundred he’d promised, but he hadn’t paid for the shirt itself. So he asked, “How much do I owe you?”
She cited a price significantly lower than he would have paid had she made the shirt under the auspices of her employer, presumably because of the different fabric. So he pulled out all the bills that remained in his wallet, which was actually more than what the shirt would have cost him at Cathcart and Quinn, and handed them to her.
“That’s too much,” she said, handing a few bills back.
He started to insist she take them anyway, but something in her voice made him stop. She sounded almost offended that he was giving her more than she asked for. So he returned the bills to his wallet. She stretched out on the love seat, tucked a throw pillow under her head and closed her eyes. He wondered where she slept at night and then noted that the wall behind the love seat looked like it housed a Murphy bed. Lying there the way she was now, she looked even smaller than she usually did, swallowed by the tiny room in which she lived.
Business concluded, it was time for Yeager to go. His flight to the other side of the world left in thirty-six hours. He had a million things to do between now and then. So why was he hesitant to leave Hannah’s cramped little apartment that looked at the back of a building across the way?
“I’m not leaving for South Africa until the day after tomorrow,” he said. “If you need to talk between now and then, just...”
Just what? he asked himself. If she needed to talk, she should just call him and he’d come right over? Hell, on days as busy as tomorrow was promising to be, he didn’t even answer his phone, let alone take on any activities that weren’t absolutely essential.
“If you need to talk, you can call me,” he told her.
“That’s okay,” she replied softly, not opening her eyes. “I’ll be fine. Thanks.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” he said. And still didn’t leave.
She opened her eyes and he felt better when he saw that some of the life had returned to their silvery depths. “Bon voyage,” she told him. “Try not to bleed on anything this time, okay?”
He grinned. “I’ll see you when I get back.”
Because he always saw her when he got back. He invariably had something that needed mending or cleaning. Funny, though, how that was the last thing he was thinking about at the moment. She really did have beautiful eyes.
“Be careful,” she told him.
“I told you those are the last words—”
“Break a leg,” she amended.
“Actually, that’s probably not the best thing to say to an extreme adventurer, either.”
“Have fun.”
“That’s more like it.”
Even though he didn’t want to, Yeager made himself cross to the front door and open it. Hannah lifted a hand in farewell then he stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind him. Leaving him to focus on all the other things he needed to do before he left town. Instead, as he made his way down Greenpoint Avenue toward the train, Yeager found himself wondering what two eye colors had to mix in a set of parents to make such an interesting combination of gray and silver in their child.
And he wondered if, when Hannah had her baby—and he was sure that somehow, some way, that would definitely happen—her child would have silver-gray eyes, too.
Four
Three weeks after Hannah asked Yeager if he would consider donating his sperm for a worthy cause, she still couldn’t believe she’d done it. Every time she remembered that conversation, she was mortified all over again. And she promised herself she would never mix acceptably good Irish whiskey and bad wine products again.
Not that she would be doing that anyway, since she’d taken the plunge and contacted a Manhattan sperm bank to begin the process of artificial insemination. With any luck, she’d be pregnant soon, something that would put an end to imbibing for a while. It would put an end to a lot of things, actually. If—no, when—Hannah became pregnant, she would enter an entirely new phase of her life, one from which she would never be able to backpedal.
She’d spent the entire week following her first conversation with Gus Fiver sorting out her thoughts, weighing the pros and cons and ins and outs of her prospects. And in the end she hadn’t been all that surprised to realize that, even more than inheriting a fortune, she wanted to get pregnant because she was ready to start a family—and probably had been for some time.
She’d wanted to be a part of a family her entire life, after all. She’d just always assumed she would need to have a life partner to achieve that. Not only because of the biological requirements, but because of the financial ones, as well. As much as Hannah wanted to have kids, there was no way she could afford to do that on her own with the life she led now. But if she’d had the financial means to raise a child, she would have started a family years ago.
If things worked out the way she now hoped—and they would work out...she hoped—she would not only have the funds to establish Joey & Kit as a driving force in the children’s fashion business, she’d also be surrounded by family as she did it. Because if she inherited the funds to raise a child right, then no way was she stopping at one. Hannah wanted a houseful of children. Children who would never, ever, be told they had to leave.
Thank goodness for twenty-first-century medical progress and social mores, enabling women who wanted a family to start one, with or without a life partner.
Which was how Hannah came to be sitting on her love seat three weeks after her first meeting with Gus Fiver, laptop open, chamomile steeping, as she perused all the online forms and documents provided by the sperm bank she would be using. And, wow, there were a lot of them. In addition to the registration form, there was the Agreement to Purchase Donor Sperm form, the Authorization to Release Frozen Sperm form, and the Authorization to Transport Frozen Specimen form. Also, the Sperm Cr
yopreservation form, the Sperm Storage form, and the Egg/Embryo/Ovarian Tissue Storage form.
And then there was all the stuff she had to read and sign off on. Articles about andrology and semen analysis and sperm-washing techniques. More articles about infectious disease screening and genetic testing and karyotyping. It was all so scientific. So clinical. So...
She sighed. So sterile.
She’d had no idea how much time, work and expense went into baby-making when a person wasn’t doing it the old-fashioned way. Still, if this was what it took, she would persevere. What was a little carpal tunnel if it meant there was a family at the end of it? Family was what she’d wanted all her life. Family and security. Now both were within her reach. Of course she would do whatever she had to do to win both.
Even if it did feel kind of cold, impersonal and dispassionate, which was the last way a child should be conceived.
It didn’t matter, she told herself again. All that mattered was that she would be able to start a family and a business and support them both. All that mattered was that she would never be separated from a family—her family—again. All that mattered was that her children would be loved to distraction and grow up in a secure, stable, permanent environment.
Okay. Pep talk over. Hannah had things to do. She had forms to fill out, a donor to choose, an egg to release... Her evening was full. Cracking her knuckles, she went to the Donor Search tab to fill in her specifications. Unfortunately, when she input her preferred traits of Caucasian, blue eyes, black hair, six-feet-plus and postgraduate degree—she knew Yeager had a master’s in Geopolitics, not that she was trying to recreate Yeager or anything like that—the search resulted in No donors available at this time.
She tried again, leaving out the part about six-feet-plus. Still nothing. Okay, fine. The donor didn’t have to have a master’s degree. Again, no results. Ultimately the closest she could get to her original preferences was a five-foot-eleven, green-eyed brunet with a BA in philosophy.
She had nearly finished filling out the initial application form when her intercom buzzer rang. Since she wasn’t expecting anyone for a pickup from Joey & Kit, she figured it was someone looking for her across-the-hall neighbor Jeannette, who seemed to know everyone in New York, though no one in New York could seem to remember that Jeannette was in unit A, not B.
Hannah went to press the buzzer, ready to tell whoever it was that they had the wrong apartment. Before she had the chance, she heard a familiar voice coming over the intercom. “Hannah? It’s Yeager. Are you home?”
After a moment of stunned surprise she replied, “Yeah, come on up,” and buzzed him in.
She knew a moment’s chagrin when she remembered she was already in her pajamas. Or, at least, what passed for pajamas on her—cotton pants decorated with fat cartoon sheep and a purple T-shirt whose sleeves she’d cut off to use for trim on one of her Joey & Kit creations. But she didn’t have time to change, so she opened her front door and stepped into the hallway at the top of the stairs to wait for Yeager.
He climbed them sluggishly, his left hand dragging along the rail beside him. She immediately knew something was wrong. That was hammered home when he finally reached the landing and looked at her. His blue eyes, usually so animated and laughing, were flat and empty. His hair was unkempt. He was unshaved. He looked as if he’d slept in his khaki trousers and white shirt, which he hadn’t even tucked in.
“Hey,” she said gently by way of a greeting when he topped the last step.
“Hi,” he said softly.
She was about to ask him what he was doing there, but something about his demeanor prevented her. Whatever his reason for coming to her place tonight, he would get to it eventually. Right now, he didn’t seem inclined to talk.
“Come on in.”
She entered first, waiting for him to pass her before closing the door behind him. He strode slowly to the love seat and heavily sat, staring straight ahead but not seeming to see anything.
Hannah sat beside him, closing her laptop and moving it to the floor to make room. “I’m sorry. I’m all out of bad wine,” she said, hoping to lighten his mood. “Would you like something else? Coffee? Tea?”
He shook his head, not even smiling at her attempt at levity. “No, that’s okay. Thanks.”
Finally he turned to look at her. She waited for him to start talking, but he remained silent. So she asked the same question he’d asked three weeks ago, the one that had led to her spilling her troubles out to him.
“Is everything okay?”
He was silent for another moment. Then he said, “Not really.” His dark brows arrowed downward and he met her gaze levelly. “I need to ask you a question.”
Heat pooled in her belly at the seriousness of his tone. Even so, she told him, “Sure.”
There was another bout of silence as he studied her face with great interest. And then, out of nowhere, he asked, “Is that offer to father your child still on the table?”
* * *
Yeager really hadn’t meant to just blurt out the question the way he had. He’d intended to preface it with all the other things he had to tell Hannah first, so it wouldn’t come as such a shock to her when he finally asked it. Then again, after what had happened in Nunavut—and how he’d felt since—the realization that he wanted to ask the question still came as a shock to him. Even more of a shock was how much he hoped she wouldn’t tell him he was too late.
It had just been a hell of a few weeks, that was all. The trip to South Africa had been everything he’d hoped for and then some, one rush of adrenaline after another, an intoxicating brew of exuberance and euphoria. But the trip to Nunavut, the one that was supposed to have been no business and all pleasure...
“Yeah, the offer is still good,” Hannah said, interrupting his thoughts, something for which he was grateful. “I mean, if you’re the one who’s interested, it is.”
“I am,” he replied immediately.
Although he could see surprise reflected in her silvery eyes, her voice was level and matter-of-fact when she replied.
“O-o-okay.”
Well, except for the nervous stammer.
She wanted to know why he’d changed his mind—the look in her eyes made that clear, too. He waited for her to ask, but the question that came out instead was, “Are you, um, sober at the moment?”
For the first time in weeks he smiled. Not a big smile, but it was good to know he could still manage one. “Stone cold,” he assured her.
“Okay,” she said again, more steadily this time. “Just wanted to make sure.”
“You want to know what’s brought about this one-eighty, don’t you?”
She nodded. He sighed. In spite of having gone over it in his head a million times, he still didn’t know how to explain it. Ultimately he decided to begin with what had reawakened the idea of fathering a child with Hannah in his head.
“I lost a good friend a couple of weeks ago,” he said.
“And by ‘lost,’ you mean...”
“He died.”
“Oh, Mr. Novak. I am so sorry.”
“Yeager,” he corrected her, since this wasn’t going to be the kind of conversation a person had with someone who only knew him on a last-name basis. “Call me Yeager, Hannah. What’s your last name?” he added, since this wasn’t the kind of conversation a person had with someone he only knew on a first-name basis, either.
Surprise flashed in her eyes again but she recovered quickly and told him. “Robinson.”
Hannah Robinson. The name suited her. Sturdy, no-nonsense.
She tried again. “I’m so sorry for your loss... Yeager.”
“Thanks,” he replied, marveling at the curl of pleasure that wound through him when she spoke his name. Where had that come from?
He waited for her to ask what had hap
pened, but she didn’t. Hannah Robinson was evidently the sort of person who didn’t pry. Normally it would have been something else he loved about her. But it would help to have her guide him through what he had to say.
“You remember how I told you I was going to Nunavut to climb Mount Thor with friends?” he began.
She nodded.
“While we were there, one of those friends... One of them had a... There was an accident,” he finally said. “We’re still not sure how it happened. I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter how it happened. But he...he fell to his death.”
“Oh, no...”
“One minute he was there and the next...”
“Oh, Yeager.”
Something in his chest grew tight and cold, a sensation that was becoming too familiar. So he did what he always did when that feeling threatened to overwhelm him. He pushed it away.
And he made himself continue. “He and I met in college. We started Ends of the Earth together. I had the head for business and he was the tech whiz. After we incorporated, I became President and CEO, and he was VP and Chief Technology Officer.” He grinned. “He was the only VP Chief Officer of anything for the first three years. He was a great guy. A good friend. Full of life. I still can’t believe he’s—”
Yeager felt himself starting to blather, so he shut himself up. Hannah seemed to understand, because she scooted closer to him on the love seat. She extended a hand toward him, hesitated, then settled it gently on his forearm. It was a careful, innocent touch, but he felt it to the depths of his soul. Maybe because it was the first comforting gesture someone had made to him since he’d returned to the States.
Hell, even before then. No one ever tried to comfort Yeager. For one thing, he had the kind of life that didn’t invite comforting, since it included everything a human being could ever want. For another thing, he had barriers in place that kept people far enough away from him to prevent them from doing things like offer comfort. At least, he’d always thought he had barriers like that in place. Hannah, however, evidently couldn’t see them.
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